Do you wish you had the technology of today when you were in hs?

This is mainly for the older crowd, since junior high and high schoolers of today already have all the technology.

Do you wish when you were in High School (Say from like 60's - 80's), that you could email, talk on a cell phone everyday, text, and...

google things?

Do you think it would have made life easier?
Are you glad it wasn't available?
Any thoughts at all?

I am glad it wasn’t available, because as you see now people don’t care about books and serious study, it’s good to have cell phone and email but not in schools.

The thing I see as a real advantage is the ability to type some or all of your work instead of handwriting everything. My husband has a serious handwriting problem and no-one really took his academic ability seriously until he bought himself a basic computer at university. Once lecturers didn't have to struggle with his handwriting, they started giving him higher grades immediately! His motivation also improved because he wasn't having to suffer from the physical discomfort of writing badly.

Other technological items can be used creatively to help struggling students - recording your homework details on your phone or ipod if you are dyslxic and can't re-read the scrawl in your homework notebook, for example. But otherwise, I think they're a serious waste of time in school.

Well, I'm not asking as it pertains to school...but in general about when you were high school age.

OK. I might have used a mobile to let my mum know where I was, that I was safe, that I'd be home soon etc - the kind of things mums need to know! We got into a huge row once when I just forgot to get in contact, and she panicked. It would be a lot easier to let her know, nowadays.

The one technology that would have really helped me is the spell checker. I've always been a rotten speller. I had a writing class my Sr. year of high school where every spelling error cost you a letter grade. I had to look up many words in a dictionary in a typical essay.

filletofspam: I hear you there, although I find spell check useless anyway- being from New Zealand, some words are spelled differently there than in the US (the default for spell check). I often find loads of words I've actually spelled correctly light up.

I spent a lot of high school without a lot of the technologies my friends had- hey, I got my first cellphone only a few years back when I got a job, while most of my friends had them since they were 14. Before then, I had an emergency payphone card in my wallet if I needed to call home. The way I see it, loads of the technology we have now we don't actually need, but we've grown accustomed to having it, so we're under the illusion we need it. I know for a fact that I can live without my cellphone, laptop and iPod, I just don't want to.

Sorry if I've gone off on a tangent, but my basic point is that sure, some of the technology we have now is useful, but if It were taken away tomorrow, I don't think I'd be too devastated.

In some ways yes, but in other ways no...I'm glad there were no mobiles phones. It would have made some things easier...I'm just not sure if that's a good thing or not, I probably wouldn't have spent much time in libraries, if I could just Google everything...hmmm...? There are positives and negatives...if you didn't have the money for a decent computer all the gadgets, you could be left behind. Albert Einstein didn't need them, are we better off with all that...or are we spiraling downward because of technology...? hmmm...dunno

Definately not. The cell phone is a major distraction. These days, people can't stand the thought of not being reached any time, any place. I'll grant that cell phones are good in an emergency situation. But 99% of the time, whatever you have to tell me can wait until later. Instead, people feel the need to talk when they drive in their cars, when they sit in a restaurant or other public place, and when they walk down the street...all of which can disrupt the people around them. F*ck cell phones...

The internet...definately would have made my high school research projects easier. And I would have been able to learn things then that I couldn't have otherwise. But, instead of surfing the net, I had my nose buried in books and periodicals in the library. And I refuse to consider that time wasted...it's helped to get me where I am today. So again, I feel technology's pace was just right.

Your last example...email. Sure it's great for everyday, random communcation and confirmation of online purchases. But my grandparents and most of my older friends still write me letters and cards. How bad does it look for me to just email them something when I could easily take a few minutes out of my week to write something by hand and mail it? How lazy am I?

So overall, I would have to say that I do not wish I had today's technology when I was in high school. If there is one exception, it would be the mp3 player. There is no advantage to having to carry around a large book of CDs instead of a portable handheld device.